Wirebonding Factory Tour

Shenzhen Adventure Day 25

01 Jul 2015

Wirebonding is a technique you’re probably familiar with if you’ve ever taken
apart a cheap toy.

It’s a slightly harder technique to employ than using a standard packaged chip,
but if employed correctly can help reduce cost (raw die is cheaper), footprint,
and weight. The cost per wire is really small!

Basically, rather than solder a chip down, you paste it down and then solder a
small wire from the chip die to the board and then cover it in goop to protect
it.

This technique used to be really hard to access, but with more automation costs
have come down drastically making this an interesting technique for a
cost-concious engineer.

The factory boss here was a very friendly lady, and she gave us an awesome tour!

An employee configures the machine. In the upper left, you can see a wiring
diagram, as well as a computer showing the current alignment.

The wirebonding machine drops small conductive wires from the bond points.

Go! Go! Go!

After wire bonding:

Ok… maybe this is before, I can’t recall. The wires are hard to see…

If there is a mistake, a worker uses a machine to correct it. The machine has
knobs which scale each human movement down by a factor of 10. This allows them
to do the detailed work needed to operate on these tiny wires.